Base Set Venusaur — the trio member nobody bid up

Summary

Vintage chase card trading well under its set-mates on comparable float and steady liquidity.

Rationale

The card cleared every quantitative gate before any qualitative judgement was applied: a PSA float deep enough to price honestly, a PSA 10 gem rate low enough to keep that float from expanding cheaply, and trailing 30-day PSA 10 sales that put it in the top decile of its set for liquidity. Entry is booked at the PriceCharting PSA 10 value for this exact card and version on the date of entry — the vault never re-books an entry at a later price.

Anchor spike analysis

An anchor card in this set printed a sharp, volume-confirmed move while this card had not repriced proportionally. Once an anchor moves on confirmed sales, the vault scans the other popular cards in that set and ranks the non-movers by remaining gap. This card ranked first on that gap after passing the standard filters. The lag setup is the highest-variance one the model produces: if the anchor move was a single-buyer artefact, no follow-through occurs and the position simply sits at cost.

Risk notes

Pokémon card values are highly speculative and mean-revert violently. A low gem rate is a supply argument, not a demand argument: if collector demand for this set cools, a scarce PSA 10 can still fall 40% or more. Population is not fixed — a grading wave can add hundreds of PSA 10 copies within a quarter and permanently reset the float. Sold-comp depth on any single card is thin enough that two motivated sellers can move the print. Treat position sizing accordingly and assume the entry price is only as good as the last transaction.